The wellness movement is making me sick. I can’t take a cleansing breath without hearing about some podcaster, celebrity — or, god forbid, dear childhood friend — who’s doing something I’m not, thereby forcing me to age by comparison. Billions of dollars are pouring into longevity research and I can barely make myself moisturize.
Wherever you look, the anti-aging fanatics are working every angle, ruining it for the rest of us.
They’re tucking themselves into hyperbaric oxygen chambers. Hooking themselves up to NAD+ IV drips. Flushing stagnant lymph fluid from their bodies.
I don’t even know what NAD+ is (and looking it up, and learning that it’s a “coenzyme for redox reactions,” didn’t help that much), but here’s what I’m sure of: Every day that I’m not buying myself more is a day I’m falling farther behind.
I should be guzzling a grass-fed-bovine-colostrum smoothie right this moment, or stealing metformin from a mouse, but instead I’m lumbering dully along, trying to survive on bargain air, my lymph fluid sloshing about.
“But do you even have excess lymph fluid?” a fact-based family member asked when I expressed a desire to spend $150 to have myself zipped into a lymphatic compression suit.
Do I? The question was inconvenient.
The compression suit — which I’ve just heard of and suddenly can’t live without — is at Remedy Place, a fancy “social wellness club” that has just landed in the Seaport.
Maybe I should rush over to the club’s hyperbaric oxygen tank. At $220 per hour, it is even pricier than the lymph treatment, true, but the chamber is so spacious that I could sit upright and work.
Hyperbaric tanks are used to treat the bends or slow-healing wounds, and never mind that I have neither. The bigger issue is that at my hourly rate of pay, the longer I spent writing in that chamber, the further I’d fall behind financially, adding stress I’d need to pay a practitioner to relieve.
I’d love to say “live and let follow every trend; even in the absence of observable results or peer-reviewed studies; and even if you don’t have the condition the remedy was designed to treat; or the small print talks about potentially serious side effects!”
But health, or at least appearing healthy, is a zero-sum game. If there’s even a chance that any of these things work (my close friend is having testosterone applied to her buttocks, and my tush remains gel-free) — even if my testosterone levels are just fine — I’m obviously going to be more susceptible to mood swings and muscle weakness. My libido will grow weak.
“Maybe we should do an IV drip,” suggested a friend (not the testosterone one; I’m ghosting her out of self-preservation).
I looked down to see if I was wearing a hospital gown, but then I remembered the IV vitamin drips are no longer for the sick. They’re for the healthy — hungover or jet-lagged though they may be.
But IV drips can run you hundreds of dollars, and that seemed like a lot when we weren’t feeling vitamin deficient.
“How about we step into a cryotherapy chamber and freeze ourselves for 90 seconds for $25,” I said, having learned about such a deal in the suburbs.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because Justin Bieber does,” I explained rationally. “And it might help with mood disorders.”
She’s in her 60s, and said that while it’s true she suffers from anxiety, it’s because she’s already fallen so far behind wrinkle- and tooth-color-wise “that I’ll never catch up.”
As for me, I miss the old days of the anti-aging Olympics, where all you needed was: a facelift, Botox, teeth whitening, a bust and rear-end lift, and monthly salon sessions to cover the gray. It seems almost … doable.
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.